Originally Posted by
Peelee
As someone who really liked Enterprise, the Temporal Cold War was an enormous mistake as a storyline and those would be the worst episodes in the entire series, if not for the Xindi storyline which quite impressively managed to be even worse. Early seasons best episodes were the ones that highlighted that there was no Starfleet, there was no prime directive, and issues that arose thereof (also Phlox-heavy episodes, he was a fantastic character).
They couldn't really do much to build up to the Romulans, though, since in TOS the Federation largely didn't even know what the Romulans looked liked, much less anything else about them (Vulcans aside).